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Professor Daniel Walkowitz

About the Course

New York City, growing from the small Dutch commercial settlement of New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century into a bustling multi-cultural city of more than 8 million and metropolis of more than 18 million by the twentieth century, is a place with many stories. A semester of 14 weeks can only touch on some of them.

Key Topics

This course will focus on the social history of the city – the peoples who have built the city and competing efforts by different numbers to authorize their dreams for the city. As arguably the capital for global capitalism today, one focus of this course will seek to plot its development and legacy for the shaping of the city. A more particular and related local story will be studied as well, however: the political and cultural interests, ideologies and players who shape and reshape the city as Manhattan, as New York and as the Metropolis.

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Course Readings

Required Reading

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, 2000, ISBN-13: 978-0195140491, ISBN-10: 0195140494

Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834, ISBN-13: 978-0807841983, ISBN-10: 0807841986

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York, 2007, AIPI

Other Readings

Christine Stansell, The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City

David M. Gordon, “Capitalist Development and the History of American Cities”, in Marxism and the Metropolis: New perspectives in urban political economy, W. Tabb & L. Sawyers, eds., 1978, ISBN-13: 978-0195033083, ISBN-10: 0195033086

Daniel Walkowitz, “New York: A Tale of Two Cities", in Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest since World War II by R. M. Bernard, 1990, ISBN-13: 9780253311771, ISBN-10: 0253311772

Matthew Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy”, in Dual City: The Restructuring New York by J. H. Mollenkopf and M. Castells, 1991, ISBN-13: 9780871546081, ISBN-10: 0871546086